Bill Knott’s Anti-Career of Guerrilla Poetry

Near the counter of the old, lamented Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston, there were boxes of ephemera: the standard hodgepodge of mangy postcards, wedding announcements, lobby cards, 45s, hippie stickers and patches, Civil Defense pamphlets and evacuation maps, poker chips, Old Maid decks, and the like, along with skinny small-press or homemade books, some even handwritten. It was in one of those boxes, in the early nineties, that I found a copy of “Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy???,” published, in 1970, by Cloud Marauder Press, out of Berkeley. Its four authors—Bill James, Knott Tate, James Bill, and Tate Knott—were, in point of fact, two people. One was James Tate, the American surrealist poet. The other was Bill Knott, an obscure but equally intriguing figure: a poet, artist, and illustrator, who penned several books, leaflets, chapbooks, and broadsides, along with, years later, blog posts and comment-section diatribes. Tate went on to literary fame and success. Knott forged, instead, an anti-career of guerrilla mischief, waged on the margins.